1
COOL KIDS DEPT.
BOOMING
B , when millennial
voters feeling the Bern threatened
to crush Hillary Clinton's Presidential
ambitions, Karen Civil, a thirty-one-
year-old social-media marketer, helped
throw a Clinton rally at the Apollo
Theatre. Renée Elise Goldsberry, a star
of "Hamilton," sang the national an-
them. Before the event, Civil posted a
video on her Snapchat account. The
record producer DJ Khaled, a Snap-
chat superstar, has a shtick that in-
volves him asking a friend how his
business is going; the answer is always
"Booming!" Civil suggested that she
and Clinton copy it. So Civil asked
Clinton, backstage, "Hillary, how's busi-
ness?" Clinton grinned and replied,
"Booming!"
"I like to take people out of their
element," Civil said the other day, at a
juice bar in downtown Los Angeles.
She wore Chanel sneakers and a pink
baseball cap embroidered with "Inspire
or Retire." "With Hillary, I'll say, 'We've
got to do something funny. We've got
to do something di erent, even when
we take pictures.'We did the 'dust your
shoulders o ' "---a visual reference to
Jay Z's "Dirt O Your Shoulder"---"at
the first rally I did for her in Atlanta."
Civil creates marketing campaigns
for hip-hop artists and music compa-
nies. Growing up in Elizabeth, New
Jersey, she built fan Web sites for the
Backstreet Boys and J. D. Williams, an
actor on "The Wire." She dropped out
of community college to intern at the
radio station Hot . Later, while work-
ing at Asylum Records, she decided that
the brand she really wanted to build
was her own. In , she launched her
Web site, featuring flip-camera inter-
views with up-and-coming rap stars
like Drake and Nicki Minaj.
"I wanted it to be a girl's point of
view of hip-hop," Civil said. "Not about
personal lives or gossip but about the
music: who produced it, when they re-
corded it." Two years later, Beats by
Dre asked her to move to L.A. and
help its marketing department. Beats
is now a client of her marketing agency,
Always Civil Enterprises.
In , the television host Terrence
Jenkins invited Civil to a holiday party
at the White House. ("I wanted to take
home a plate, but when Barack started
his talk he said, 'Make sure you don't
take the china or silverware.' So I took
a napkin and a macaroon.") Last year,
Civil spoke at a White House event
for young women activists, and got
on the radar of De'Ara Balenger, the
Clinton campaign's director of engage-
ment. "From the outset, we were ob-
sessed with Karen," Balenger said. She
invited Civil to critique the campaign's
social-media presence.The good: Clin-
ton's old Instagram tagline, "Pantsuit
Aficionado." The bad: Clinton's gen-
eral unhipness.
In September, , Balenger hired
Civil to help make Clinton cooler. Since
then, there has been a noticeable uptick
in rap and R. & B. stars on the periph-
ery of the campaign. Usher attended
the October, , rally that Civil or-
ganized in Atlanta. At a campaign event
in Philadelphia, in August, the rapper
Freeway, who'd been diagnosed with
kidney failure, spoke about a ordable
health care. "We gonna get it poppin'
for Hillary," he told the crowd. A few
weeks ago in Florida, Civil helped put
Clinton's running mate,Tim Kaine, on-
stage with the rapper Pusha T (sample
lyric: "They call me Pusha for one rea-
son, 'cause I keep that sni all seasons").
Afterward, on "The Late Show," Ste-
phen Colbert asked Pusha T if he ac-
tually knew Clinton. "We met each other
via FaceTime, via Karen Civil," he said.
As Clinton has got up to speed,
so have campaign elders. Minyon
Moore, a senior adviser who worked
in Bill Clinton's White House, said,
"With the millennial space, you don't
have to understand it to try and get in-
volved with it."
"I just hang with all the young, cool
kids there," Civil said. She mentioned
Balenger's boss but struggled to re-
member her name. It's Huma Abedin.
Civil took a sip of beet juice (she
went vegan a year ago). Her phone
buzzed. The rapper Paul Wall wanted
to know if she'd be at the opening
of his Houston store. It specializes in
"grillz" for teeth, and Wall had engraved
a gold one with Civil's name for her
birthday, which is on Election Day.
"It's really about continuing the leg-
acy that Obama started," Civil said. "I
know we still deal with racism and
being divided, but he makes you feel
like this is one nation, with his de-
meanor, his swag." She went on, "It's,
like, there's never going to be another
them. But I want somebody to keep
that momentum going."
---Sheila Marikar
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 14, 2016 33
harnesses, and food kits called My Pa-
triot Supply.)
At Fifty-fourth Street, he came upon
the Hilton, where, in , his idol,
Ronald Reagan, announced his Presi-
dential bid. (The Gipper was unim-
pressed by the "pigeon-crap-encrusted
metropolis.") "Reagan didn't believe in
the government," Beck said. "He didn't
believe in the party. He believed in the
people."
It was this brand of populism that
he thought Michelle Obama invoked
so well. "She didn't say, 'The govern-
ment should do X, Y, or Z.' She said,
'We , ' ' Us'---without a political party. 'We
are better.' 'We need to stop this,' " he
said. "It had to do with 'Who are you
as a human being?' 'How do you view
women?' Brilliant speech," he said.
"That was a moment that transcended
all political thought."
He didn't know who wrote the
speech. "I don't want to know," he said.
"But that felt real. And if it wasn't?
We're in big trouble."
---Nicholas Schmidle
Karen Civil